Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul

By Scott Weidensaul

In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey-a one hundred day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and into Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Two years later, Wild America, their classic account of the trip, was published.

On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today. How has the continent's natural landscape changed over the past fifty years? How have the wildlife, the rivers, and the rugged, untouched terrain fared? The journey takes Weidensaul to the coastal communities of Newfoundland, where he examines the devastating impact of the Atlantic cod fishery's collapse on the ecosystem; to Florida, where he charts the virtual extinction of the great wading bird colonies that Peterson and Fisher once documented; to the Mexican tropics of Xilitla, which have become a growing center of ecotourism since Fisher and Peterson's exposition. And perhaps most surprising of all, Weidensaul finds that much of what Peterson and Fisher discovered remains untouched by the industrial developments of the last fifty years. Poised to become a classic in its own right, Return to Wild America is a sweeping survey of the natural soul of North America today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2006
• ISBN: 9781429931922

Scott Weidensaul

Scott Weidensaul is the author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Return to Wild America, The Ghost with Trembling Wings and Mountains of the Heart. He lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians.

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Preface

The mind is so easily tricked. One moment I was balanced over an abyss, waves crashing almost three hundred feet below me, the rim of the cliff a hundred feet above my head; my fingers were locked and white on the safety rope as I tried not to shift even fractionally from the narrow ledge of loose rock and dirt on which I had paused. Vertiginous space yawned below. I haven’t an especially good head for heights, and this seemed, very insistently, to have been a bad idea.

Then cold fog enveloped me, the kind of thick, cotton-batting mist that’s common to summer in the North Atlantic and has a solidity all its own. No longer able to see the long, lurching drop below me, I unconsciously relaxed; I took slower, deeper breaths, and my fingers eased up a bit on the rope. I realized that Tony, the fellow who was leading me down this windswept cliff on Newfoundland’s Cape St. Mary’s, was already vanishing into the white, and I resumed my undignified, butt-scraping descent behind him.

Tony stopped some yards farther, down an even more precipitous slope, and with a final rain of small pebbles I eased in beside him on a ridiculously thin finger of dirt and tufted grass. My glasses were clouded with moisture, and with one hand I dug out a handkerchief and cleaned them. That’s when I noticed six murres perching on the edge of the dropoff, barely ten feet away—slim seabirds, black and white in a tuxedoed, vaguely penguinish way, sitting stiffly erect like bowling pins. Their beaks were thin and pointed, with a bit of an upward tilt. They cocked their heads, shifting from foot to foot and looking, from each other to us and back again, with what seemed to be incredulity: Humans? Here?

So captivated was I by the sight that it took me a moment to realize that the fog had swept away. The chasm gaped below me again, but this time it scarcely registered.

Birds. There were birds everywhere—a vast city of them, close enough almost to touch.

As though the fog had deadened all my senses, I was suddenly overwhelmed by renewed sight, sound, and smell. On three sides, the cliff fell off vertically to the sea, where heavy green waves smashed to foam on the black rock. To our right, across a deep crevasse in which the breakers boomed and sucked, we faced a sheer wall just thirty feet away and stared right into the eyes of hundreds of nesting birds—murres jammed shoulder to shoulder, razorbills clinging to any purchase they could find, and the delicate little gulls called kittiwakes with their nests of piled seaweed. Gannets, huge and white, with rapier bills and tapered wings, wheeled above and below us, sailing through wraiths of mist snaking along the twisting breeze. The air reeked with the fish-guts smell of guano and reverberated with noise, a wall of cries and screams: the moaning aaaarrr-aaaarrr of the murres, the shrill kitti-weeeeikk, kitti-weeeeikk of the gulls, the rattling barks of the gannets, and the croak of an egg-stealing raven, whose sudden appearance panicked the colony into even greater crescendos.

In a lifetime of messing around with birds, I rank the next half hour, clinging to the side of Cape St. Mary’s, among the finest moments. It wasn’t just proximity; this was an astonishing degree of intimacy with species that have always been little more than blurs in a spotting scope. I could see the individual white feathers that ringed the eye of a bridled murre, the sheen of iridescent green and blue on the scales of a slender fish it held clamped in its beak, the flecking of tiny mist droplets collecting on the brown-black feathers of its throat. Looking closely, I realized I could see my own reflection in its dark eyes.

This was the first time I had been to Cape St. Mary’s, but in a vivid sense it felt like a homecoming. In the spring of 1953, the field-guide author and birding guru Roger Tory Peterson set out with his friend, the noted British naturalist James Fisher, on what became a legendary journey—a thirty-thousand-mile, hundred-day marathon around the margins of North America, from the North Atlantic, down the Appalachians to the Florida Everglades, around the Gulf and coastal Texas and deep into Mexico, then up through the desert Southwest, along the Pacific coast into the Northwest, out into the tundra wilderness of western Alaska, and finally to the cold and remote Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. Two years later, in the fall of 1955, they published Wild America, a bestselling account of the travels that today remains a beloved classic.

Their journey began here, in Newfoundland, among the gannets and murres of Cape St. Mary’s, one of the loneliest outposts of the continent’s easternmost rim—a place of tundra barrens and twisted spruces where herds of caribou graze on headlands below which whales breach and roll and where seabirds by the tens of thousands crowd the rocky cliffs. For me, as for many naturalists who read that book over the past half century, Cape St. Mary’s has thus always had an almost electric pull, and the patina of great adventure.

I first read Wild America as a kid, with a kid’s understanding and with a kid’s jealousy and longing. I saw it as an almost endless holiday adventure, two buddies chasing birds and exploring distant, empty places—the deep swamps of the Florida Panhandle where ivory-billed woodpeckers still lived; Native villages in Alaska where Eskimos paddled skin boats and lived in sod-covered shelters; cloud forests in Mexico full of colorful birds I’d never heard of, whose names dripped exoticism: Motmot. Potoo. Euphonia.

I came back to the book as a young adult who had begun his own travels, and with a fresh perspective. I was struck this time by the sheer magnitude of the task Peterson and Fisher set for themselves—the enormity of the distance they covered in just three and a half months, almost all of it in a big Ford station wagon that ran out of gas and blew tires in singularly inconvenient places. In spite of this, they still managed to average three hundred miles a day while setting a new record for the most species of birds seen in a single year, shooting miles of motion-picture footage and hundreds of still photographs, and maintaining voluminous field notes on the rich diversity of plant and animal life they encountered. And across all the miles, these two close but relatively new friends (who had met just three years earlier) admitted to but a single argument.

When I read Wild America now, it is with those past layers of excitement and admiration, but with something else keener and still more evocative—the realization that Fisher and Peterson saw a continent and a culture at a turning point. For a century before their trip, America’s nascent conservation movement had been taking shape, sparked by disgust over the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, the pillaging of forests, and the waste of natural resources. It had, in its early days, been driven by moneyed and well-educated society, but in the years following World War II it began to emerge as a national force, drawing much of its strength from ordinary people who found enjoyment in amateur nature study.

Wherever one goes, from one remote end to another of our two great Unions, this interest in natural history is growing, developing, hungrily seeking inspiration, Fisher wrote after attending a packed-house meeting of the Newfoundland Natural History Society. He was too polite, or too modest, to add that he and Peterson themselves deserved much of the credit. Peterson’s bestselling field guide to birds was, in 1934, the first measurable manifestation of a growing thirst by the wider, increasingly urbanized public to reconnect with nature; in the years thereafter, his field guides sold more than 10 million copies. Fisher had done much the same for nature study in England, popularizing it through his writing and BBC broadcasts. In the 1950s, bird-watching and related pastimes were still considered slightly fussy, eccentric hobbies in America, but even those who didn’t crouch in the bushes with binoculars had a growing interest in the natural world and were uneasy about humanity’s impact on it. Conservationists, exerting the muscle that comes with broader support, began to pick—and win—high-profile battles, like their defeat of plans for the Echo Park Dam on the upper Colorado in Dinosaur National Monument, or the push for controls on water pollution, presaging the great strides to come in the 1960s and ’70s, when the environmental movement became a national priority.

The wild America through which Peterson and Fisher traveled, and about which they wrote, was also changing. The first half of the twentieth century was the quiet nadir for conservation in North America. By the turn of the century, the continent’s eastern forests had been laid waste, and the timbermen were turning to the old-growth stands of the West and the Northwest. The once-huge stocks of wildlife were on the verge of extermination—the bison almost gone, the elk and pronghorn rare, even white-tailed deer a threatened species. Passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and heath hens all tumbled into extinction. Things began to improve, slowly, with the worst excesses of market hunting and the feather trade banned, with creation of the National Wildlife Refuge and the National Forest systems by Teddy Roosevelt, who also wielded the Antiquities Act to protect such treasures as the Grand Canyon and the Olympic Mountains. Predators remained in the gun sights, though, with most western states (aided by the federal government) actively exterminating large predators like wolves and grizzlies in the 1920s and ’30s, then turning their lethal attention to smaller species like coyotes and birds of prey. Even though Fisher and Peterson spent weeks traveling through Mexico, the Southwest, and the Sierras, they didn’t see a single golden eagle—a frequent target of ranchers—until they reached Oregon.

It’s easy to overlook how far we’ve come in America, where conservation is concerned, unless you take the long view that half a century affords. In the 1950s, there was no effective federal oversight of the air or water; although Congress tried to regulate urban water pollution in Chicago as early as 1910, even the most grotesque abuses were usually seen not as a stigma but as the inevitable price of economic growth. When Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, it was so toothless it provided not a single enforcement agent, nor any recourse to the courts. Endangered species, untouched wilderness, free-flowing rivers—they had no legal standing or substantive protection. When, in 1953, a Supreme Court justice championed the idea of preserving open space by preventing the construction of a highway along the historic Chesapeake & Ohio Canal near Washington, D.C., many people thought him a kook. Instead, he was in the vanguard of a change in public attitude that would revolutionize the way we think of the natural world.

It took a series of environmental crises, however, to galvanize Americans in the fight for environmental protection. An air inversion in the fall of 1948 over Donora, Pennsylvania, just south of Pittsburgh, trapped air pollution from the Monongahela valley’s zinc smelter, steel plants, and coal-burning locomotives, killing nineteen people and hospitalizing many more and spurring the first attempt at federal clean-air legislation in 1955. Urban rivers around the country, loaded with debris and pollutants, were catching fire with depressing regularity—in Buffalo, Detroit, and most famously, Cleveland, whose Cuyahoga River repeatedly burst into flames. One such blaze, in 1952, caused $1.5 million in damage, though it was a smaller fire in 1969 that finally received national attention, along with a disastrous oil spill along the Southern California coast. The unfettered use of pesticides was also a growing worry. Roger Peterson had studied DDT’s effects on birds for the Army during World War II and was an early critic of the burgeoning chemical arsenal, lecturing through the 1950s on the dangers of pesticides and pollution. It wasn’t until the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by his friend the biologist Rachel Carson, however, that the country took alarmed notice, making the word ecology part of the national vocabulary and setting the modern environmental movement in motion.

All these threads came together in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the United States—in a remarkably short period of time—tried to reverse the course of two centuries of reckless exploitation. The Wilderness Act, proposed in 1955 in the aftermath of the Echo Park Dam fight, finally passed Congress in 1964 after being rewritten sixty-six times, one of the first links in a chain of federal and state environmental protections that owed much to the lobbying of increasingly potent conservation organizations like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the National Audubon Society, and the fast-growing constituencies for which they spoke. Most of the seminal laws were forged in a span of just seven years. The National Trails and Wild and Scenic Rivers acts of 1968 were modest steps, but 1969’s National Environmental Policy Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were major developments, followed the next year by the Clean Air Act (which greatly expanded protections first outlined in 1955). The first Earth Day, in 1970, showed the breadth of public support for such action, and politicians took note, passing the Clean Water Act in 1972, along with legislation giving protection to coastal areas and regulating pesticide use (that same year, the EPA banned the use of DDT). A robust Endangered Species Act followed in 1973, and the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Never, before or since, had a nation so quickly and fundamentally rewritten its laws to give the natural world a measure of protection.

As they set out on their journey, Peterson and Fisher may have sensed that the tables were starting to turn in conservation’s favor. And though they may not have known it, the two men also saw America at a cultural crossroads. The postwar economic prosperity was kicking in, and the baby boom was under way. Not only was 1953 the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight; it was the anniversary as well of the first cross-country automobile trip. The modern car culture was taking off, and serious work on an interstate highway system was in the offing; color television was about to hit the stores, and suburbia was rapidly expanding. Yet there is a nostalgic quaintness to Wild America today. As Fisher and Peterson flew into Boston from their first stop in Newfoundland, various never-before-seen objects were identified from the air by James, including a clover-leaf crossing, a baseball field, and Boston’s only skyscraper. He failed at a drive-in motion picture theater, which had to be carefully explained to him. And to their readers, the authors felt they had to explain what motels and air-conditioning were.

Wild America touched a nerve with Americans, as had several other recent books. Aldo Leopold’s epochal A Sand County Almanac, with its revolutionary ideas on ecology and humanity’s relationship with the wild world, had appeared in 1949, giving the environmental movement its philosophical framework through Leopold’s notion of a land ethic. Then, in 1951, Edwin Way Teale had published North with the Spring, the first of an eventual quartet of seasonal nature travelogues, which at least partially inspired Wild America. What set the latter book apart, though, was Peterson’s extraordinary knowledge of American flora and fauna coupled with Fisher’s unusual perspective of being an experienced naturalist in a completely new land. Fisher had never set foot in North America until he joined Roger Peterson in Newfoundland, and his journals, which formed the meaty core of the book, showed a engaging combination of wide-eyed boy and seasoned scientist.

Coming back to Wild America in my middle age, I realized that this book, whose meaning for me has evolved with the decades, might serve yet another purpose—that half a century was a pretty good benchmark from which to gauge the land Peterson and Fisher saw. I could retrace their journey and see how the continent’s natural soul—and ours—were faring at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

It was something Peterson and his third wife, Virginia, were planning to do themselves (Fisher having died in a car accident in 1970, leaving a void in his American friend’s world). There is another book to be written about Wild America, Peterson wrote in 1980, shortly after the publication of the fourth edition of his legendary field guide. Ginny and I will repeat this odyssey at a more leisurely pace and try to describe the changes that have taken place in 30 years. The Petersons never made the trip, though a few years later the Canadian naturalist Lyn Hancock did, for a book she called Looking for the Wild. Roger Peterson himself died in 1996, at the age of eighty-seven, his plans to redo the 1953 journey unfulfilled.

So, well aware of the hubris of following in such big footsteps, I pulled out stacks of maps and my old, thumb-worn copy of their book and started running my finger along the route Roger Peterson had laid out for them. Fisher was a seabird biologist, so their journey hugged the coast for the most part. This gave me pause; it would seem a fool’s errand to search for America’s wilderness heart not in the high Rockies or the North Woods but largely along the densely populated, rapidly sprawling rim of the continent where they traveled—from the northeastern megalopolis to the Sunbelt and Southern California. And it’s true that many places that were at least nominally wild in the 1950s have now been paved, parceled, and Wal-Marted out of existence.

Yet I found that wild America is still out there, its tenacity and strength surprising. It’s on the long, lonely sandspits of South Monomoy Island off Massachusetts, where gray seals weave intricate knots in the clear water beneath one’s boat as flights of shorebirds stream overhead. It’s in the deep mountain forests of the Smokies, where elk roam again after 150 years’ absence; in the orchid-draped, panther-haunted Fakahatchee Strand in Florida, in the sky islands of the southwestern deserts, and in the alpine meadows of the Olympic Mountains.

Much of this is due to nature’s inherent resiliency, but a lot of the credit goes to the more enlightened policies that have reshaped our relationship with the natural world in the past half century—to aggressive attempts to restore the land and bring back long-vanished species. The bedrock environmental laws passed in the 1960s and ’70s did much to stanch the worst wounds, but in recent decades we have begun to try our hand at restoration, at actually rebuilding what had been almost wholly destroyed—an imperfect process of trial and (thus far) more error than success, but the mere fact that we’re attempting it is cause for hope.

It is both an irony and an obscenity, therefore, that against this historic arc of progress we’re now confronting the most environmentally hostile administration and Congress in generations, which have made dismantling those fundamental environmental safeguards a national priority—though they window-dress their actions with claims of streamlining bureaucracy or balancing the needs of nature and commerce. Because most Americans, regardless of their political views, consider the environment an important issue, few of these battles have been waged openly. Far more often they have been the result of administrative rule changes that receive scant attention and are relatively immune to public debate, like the rule announced a few days before Christmas, 2004, that eviscerated the 1976 National Forest Management Act, making it far easier for national forest managers to open 191 million acres to logging or drilling, and severely restricting public participation in the forest planning process. By reinterpreting how laws should be applied and enforced, they can appear to leave intact the environmental regulations that the vast majority of Americans support while reducing them to a hollow and ineffectual shell.

It has been a debilitating period for conservationists. But as grim as the current political scene may be, once I took to the road, following the faint trail Peterson and Fisher laid down five decades ago, I came to see that there is still much to celebrate—more, perhaps, than a conservationist may realize, unless he or she takes the long view that such an anniversary provides. The National Wildlife Refuge System (which marked its hundredth year in 2003) has nearly quintupled in size since the early 1950s, to more than 93 million acres, including some places—like the Yukon River delta in Alaska, which was added to the system in 1960—that Peterson and Fisher urged be protected in just such a fashion. The federal wilderness system, which didn’t even exist until 1964, now encompasses more than 106 million acres.

Along the lower Rio Grande, which Fisher and Peterson mourned as a lost wilderness, native forest is being resurrected from old farmland to create a 275-mile corridor for rare birds and wildcats; the widespread slaughter of birds of prey has been replaced by universal protection, and large carnivores like wolves and even jaguars are returning to areas where they’ve long been absent. America’s supple, resurgent wilderness has created wholly unexpected dramas that would have awed Peterson and Fisher. They had to travel to the Coronados Islands of Mexican Baja to see a handful of surviving elephant seals; today the huge pinnipeds are found by the tens of thousands along the California shore—and with them have come leviathan hunters. Today scientists off California’s Farallon Islands watch, awestruck, as eighteen-foot great white sharks grapple with the three-ton seals, the most extraordinary contest between predator and prey in all of North America.

One of the things that strikes me most forcefully today as I reread the original Wild America is how remarkably prescient Roger Peterson and James Fisher were about many of the emerging threats to North America’s natural systems. They already recognized the damage of what we now call sprawl development (though I doubt even they could foresee the colossal growth in suburban and coastal zones). And long before others were concerned, they voiced warnings about the impact of invasive alien species and foresaw the increasingly bitter fight over scarce water resources in the West and over questions of forest management like protection for old-growth stands on federal land and the proper role of fire.

Yet the modern world is also bringing pressures to bear that they scarcely imagined—environmental contaminants that are far more subtle (and potentially far more damaging) than the pesticides like DDT they worried about, for example. Nor could they foresee the overarching specter of global climate change. The high Cascade glaciers they admired are retreating toward swift extinction, and Alaska, which served as a climax for their continental odyssey, is showing the effects of global warming in startlingly unambiguous ways.

I went to the great gannetry at Cape St. Mary’s to pick up the trail of two of the twentieth century’s most accomplished naturalists. Because my goal wasn’t merely to run a valedictory lap for their book, I would be using their original itinerary as a broad framework, but I wouldn’t follow it with religious precision; I’d deviate a bit from their route to visit places that best illustrate the changing landscape or to see sights that weren’t even possible for them to enjoy in 1953.

The pace would also be much different. Where they sprinted, I would amble. Peterson and Fisher pushed themselves relentlessly for three and a half brutal months, taking just two days off in all that time, often driving through the night to keep to Roger’s meticulously plotted schedule. The breathless quality that comes from this perpetual motion is one of Wild America’s charms, but I needed time to dig deeper, to look more contemplatively at a continent that has changed dramatically in fifty years. And so I would make most of the journey over the space of about nine months, gaining in insight, I hoped, what I lost in perfect replication.

I found a continent changed—for the better in some places, for the worse in others. Yet the land, the rugged heart of natural America, retains an essential timelessness, which on my own journey I discovered again and again. Ours is still, at its core, a wild country. Never have I seen such wonders, James Fisher wrote at the end of their trip, or met landlords so worthy of their land. They have had, and still have, the power to ravage it; and instead they have made it a garden.

ONE

Atlantic Gateway

In the early 1950s, just getting to Cape St. Mary’s was an adventure. The Avalon Peninsula is the easternmost prow of North America—a vaguely H-shaped chunk of land that is very nearly an island itself, attached to the rest of Newfoundland by the slenderest of threads. It is rimmed by sheer cliffs, by beaches of dark quartz-shot cobblestones and wave-smashed capes. Where there is forest, it is somber and mossy, spruce and balsam fir hung with long pale sheets of lichen dangling from the branches like rotting curtains. But much of the Avalon is tundra, known locally as barrens—an open, windswept land home to flocks of ptarmigan and the southernmost wild caribou herd in the world, where the trees, if they grow at all, cower in dense, waist-high thickets known as tuckamore.

When Fisher and Peterson met here to begin their journey, Newfoundland was very much a world apart, sparsely populated and isolated from the rest of the country not only geographically but also politically; it had confederated with Canada only four years earlier, ending its long history as a separate dominion of Great Britain. Most of the people lived in remote fishing villages called outports accessible only by sea, and beyond the handful of large towns like St. John’s the few roads were largely dirt and gravel, and at times all but disappeared into the spruce bogs.

Accompanied by the local ornithologist Leslie Tuck, the two travelers spent a long day bouncing south from St. John’s on awful roads. Fisher, keyed up to see new birds, found himself seeking the differences and finding the similarities; the first North American species he saw was a gannet, which was also the last British species he’d seen as his plane crossed the Scottish coast. This isn’t surprising; few places in North America have as strong an Old World flavor, at least in terms of natural diversity, as Newfoundland. The landscape, Fisher thought, was strikingly similar to the spruce forests he’d known in Sweden, and of the forty-six species of birds they saw, almost two-thirds were ones he knew from Europe. He was stunned to find that the most common birdsong in the dark conifer woods was a voice as familiar to me in my own English garden as on the cliffs of St. Kilda and the remote Shetland Islands—that of the tiny winter wren. Though a common backyard bird in Great Britain, in North America it inhabits only the boreal forests of the North or high elevations.

They spent the night in the fishing hamlet of St. Bride’s, where the navigable road ended, and the next day—with a local guide and a pony to carry Peterson’s heavy camera gear—they set off for the great seabird colony near the Cape St. Mary’s lighthouse, ten miles down the coast. The special attraction would be thousands of northern gannets, majestic seabirds with six-foot wingspans and an extraordinary means of fishing in which they plunge, like white lances, straight down from more than a hundred feet in the air, hitting the water like Olympic high divers to intercept fish far beneath the surface. Fisher was perhaps the world’s leading authority on gannets, and he was anxious to see them on this side of the Atlantic.

The most spectacular New World [gannet] colony, the one at Bonaventure Island off the Gaspé, is visited by scores of bird students every year, Peterson noted. It has become a profitable thing for the innkeeper to cater to—and even advertise to—an unending succession of summer gannet watchers … On the other hand, the colony at Cape St. Mary[’s] sometimes goes for several years unvisited by any of the field-glass fraternity. It was easy to see why. The exhausting hike, first along a muddy, rutted cart track, and then overland around treacherous bogs, took them until early afternoon, and they didn’t make it back to St. Bride’s until well after midnight, Peterson limping from a badly strained leg muscle.

It’s a safe bet that Peterson and Fisher would find Cape St. Mary’s today a strange, perhaps disquieting blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I flew into St. John’s with my fiancée, Amy Bourque, who was taking some time off from the Audubon sanctuary she ran in Maryland to get me started on my way and would join me at a couple of other points in the year ahead. Our drive from St. John’s to St. Bride’s took a couple of easy hours in a rental car, with just one stretch of gravel track that skirted bogs bounded by stands of pink rhodora azaleas. It was a cold day in the middle of June; the sedges and irises made an emerald splash along the coffee-colored rivers, where a few blackish spruce grew, but higher up, the still-brown tundra rolled inland beyond the limit of vision, empty of any sign of humanity.

The reason for this little slice of the Arctic, at the same latitude as Montreal and Seattle, is the ocean. Pack ice surrounds much of the Avalon Peninsula until April or May, and throughout the summer icebergs that originated in Greenland are a common sight, floating south on the Labrador Current. Especially along the immediate coastline, summer fogs are an almost daily event, bathing the land in damp cold that counteracts the wan heat of the sun. This creates an ecosystem known as hyperoceanic barrens—a nearly horizontal plant community dominated by ground-hugging Arctic species like crowberry, several species of cranberries, hardy grasses, and pale reindeer lichen in spongy green-white mats, into which a hiker sinks ankle-deep. Dwarf Arctic willows, with trunks barely as thick as a finger, spread over rocks like a green cascade, raising maroon flowers five or six inches above the ground, their diminutive stature masking the fact that these trees are often three or four hundred years old, as deserving of awe as any craggy old-growth pine.

From the air, the center of the Avalon Peninsula, and its southern capes in particular, appear pale brown, edged with black; the brown is the tundra barrens, while the darker rim is the spruce woods, which cling to the lower elevations and deeper river valleys. We spent part of one day hiking along some of the rivers that cut across the barrens, providing a convenient pathway in the otherwise featureless landscape. The only green was down along the water, where thick grass and irises were sprouting, but when we looked closely, the tundra was coming into great flower as well.

To my eye it all looks like classic Arctic tundra, but there are enough floral differences that a botanist would immediately peg this as Newfoundland barrens: a spongy, wet mat of sphagnum moss and crowberry studded with pitcher plant, the diminutive white flowers of goldthread, and the pink of pale laurel, barely an inch high. Cloudberry, Newfoundland’s famous bake-apple, was just opening its single white flowers that would, by August, produce the delicious clear orange raspberries that are a provincial obsession. Much of the ground was covered in creeping juniper or, where there was a bit more shelter, patches of spruce tuckamore that were barely waist-high but might be four or five hundred years old.

We were watching for caribou, and there was plenty of sign—a lot of droppings, some quite fresh, and tracks in the mud, each print slightly wasp-waisted in the middle. We also found the remains of a calf that had died over the winter, down along the stream—a corona of white hair and the clean, bleached bones, along with piles and piles of mammal scat, much of it fox, all of it containing great quantities of caribou fur. When we later saw a live caribou, a large bull, it was albescent, as white as the weathered bones; even its nose was pale gray, so that the only color was the dark eyes and the black hair that grew inside its ears.

The wind howled, and for five minutes a cold, heavy downpour soaked us before the sun peeked back out apologetically. We hiked an hour or so down the main river, then looped back and struck a smaller tributary, which had cut a confused series of low gorges in the rock—a creek maybe thirty feet wide, the water so stained with tannin it was nearly black. It was fed by a series of small pools and ponds on the higher ground to either side; some of these were jewel-like, surrounded by sedges and irises, set in little steep-sided dells where the wind couldn’t reach and the dark water reflected the sky like glass. In one, a yellow-rumped warbler alit on a rocky shelf above the water, blue-gray against the yellow lichen, flew down to splash with its reflection, then whirled off with a single chip.

More than a thousand square kilometers of the central Avalon are protected as a wilderness reserve, but even the margins are largely wild, largely empty land. The only paved road is a loop that skirts the edge of the sea, linking the small towns like St. Shott’s and Trepassey, with a handful of dirt tracks like the one that runs down to the old lighthouse at Cape Race, where we were paced by swift-flying horned larks and found the remains of a freshly killed murre on a low bluff beside the sea, its feathers gently waving in a long plume to the leeward where a peregrine falcon had sat and plucked it. Its skeleton was still wet and bloody, the two black wings untouched, but the falcon was gone.

On the forty-mile-long peninsula that ends at Cape St. Mary’s, the road dipped and soared, moving down into sheltered hollows and then up across great headlands where the wind lashed the long grass furiously. The cove villages were small—Great Barasway, Patrick’s Cove, Gooseberry Cove—a few dozen houses, maybe a church, old fishing boats hauled up. The beaches were all of rounded stone, not sand, formed in a series of wide steps rising fifteen or twenty feet, testament to the heights of the tides and the strength of the surf; the highest levels had the biggest cobbles, gray and purplish rocks the size of moderate pumpkins, dark and tiger-striped with thin layers of quartz.

At one point we got out of the car for a stretch, heading for a tidal pond a quarter mile down the coast, where gulls and terns darted into the choppy outflow. The tide was well out, and while there were no tidal pools per se, we could walk carefully over the flat cobble beach, trying to stay on the larger, drier rocks, lifting up mats of rockweed to peek underneath. The water was polar, and my fingers began to ache, but there was too much stuff under there to stop: limpets cruising slowly over the pinkcrusted stones; anemones the size of fifty-cent pieces wedged in the crevices, their striped tentacles spread wide; hordes of mating amphipods like tiny, half-inch shrimp, the males bigger and bright red, cupping the gray-brown females with their hooked front legs. Along the high-tide line, among the brittle wine-brown pieces of old kelp, there were uncountable millions of the exoskeletons of these creatures, each dried a delicate purple-pink, and so fragile that no matter how carefully I tried, they fell to pieces when I picked them up.

We found the bones of eiders and seabirds, as well as dozens of dead skates, reduced to spiny tails a foot long, curling and dry, and a few bony pieces set in the framework of their cartilaginous skeletons. The jaws looked alarmingly like large, fleshy lips from some nightmare, not soft but harsh and covered with rows of tiny, sharp teeth. The tide line was also festooned with junk, most of it the detritus of commercial fishing: mesh bait bags; long skeins of tangled half-inch nylon rope in blue, yellow, and green; scraps of netting; and fragments of wooden lobster traps. There were also lots of shotgun shells, the brass bases long gone but the plastic casings still looking quite fresh; twelve-gauge, mostly, and in numbers I found hard to credit—hundreds and hundreds of them strewn along the shore. Even granting that plastic lasts basically forever, I couldn’t imagine what anyone would be shooting in such quantity. It would be some days before that particular mystery was solved for me.

St. Bride’s sits at the end of the cape road, bigger than its neighbors to the north—big enough, at least, for a gas station/general store/tackle shop/motel known as the Bird Island Resort, which, as its name suggests, owes much of its custom to tourists anxious to visit Cape St. Mary’s, an official wildlife reserve since 1964. A cluster of efficiency units perched on the edge of the high cliff, neat as pins and looking out over the water by a wee miniature golf course on an equally wee patch of lawn. (Our room, I found, came thoughtfully equipped with a golf club.)

It was not a day for mini-golf, though. The sea was leaden, and it was ear-pinching cold; even the locals were huddled inside their parkas with the hoods up, and snow flurries were in the forecast. The wind was really cooking, shaking the motel, ripping at the still mostly brown grass, plunging over the cliff and fanning out to sea in furious gusts. I could only imagine how much colder and gloomier it must have been for Peterson and Fisher, arriving as they had in early April.

St. Bride’s spreads out over a mile or so of flat land above and to either side of a small creek, anchored by two large graveyards near the highest points on either side of the valley. The houses were generally small and boxy, devoid of yard trees, painted mostly white but with the flashes of gaudy color I find delightful in Newfoundland towns; one square building was brilliant purple, others had their shutters, trim, and a wide band below their rooflines painted kelly green or cobalt. It’s a scene that has changed little since the 1950s, except that the road is better and now the village is wired for electricity. But one change my predecessors would have noticed: here and elsewhere along the cape there are far fewer boats hauled up these days in the village coves, and the racks of drying codfish, with their all-pervasive smell, are long gone.

Timeless as Newfoundland may appear, in recent decades it has been swept with changes that are little short of tectonic. Fifty years ago, cod fishing was the engine that drove this region, as it had for five hundred years before that. Most Newfoundlanders made their living from the sea, and for much of the year that meant fishing for cod, which were once so plentiful they could be caught simply by lowering a weighted basket over the side. As late as the 1960s, cod populations were robust and harvests were high, but mechanized factory trawlers were siphoning off the schools in unsustainable numbers, and government subsidies meant more and more fishermen chasing what was left; by one estimate, more cod were taken between 1960 and 1975 than in the 250 years prior.

By the 1980s, inshore fishermen were seeing cod dwindle in numbers and size, and some of the government’s own top scientists warned that the official stock estimates were hugely inflated. In 1986, one scientist, speaking at a conference, politely suggested (in Latin) that his department’s perennially rosy assessments were non gratum anus rodentum, not worth a rat’s ass.

By 1992, the situation had become so dire that a moratorium was imposed on cod fishing off parts of Newfoundland; the following year, it was extended to all groundfish. An estimated thirty thousand people were thrown out of work and into government retraining programs, and a culture wedded to the sea was gutted. Rural Newfoundland, already struggling economically, began to hemorrhage its population as people moved away to find work. When cod showed some small signs of recovery in the late 1990s, the government prematurely reopened some fishing, driving stocks to even lower levels than before while putting most of the blame on seals, colder-than-normal water, and other natural pressures. In April 2003, the Canadian fisheries minister finally declared a complete closure of cod fishing in the country’s Atlantic waters.

Even while traditional rural livelihoods like fishing were reeling, Newfoundland’s inherent beauty had been stoking a different industry—tourism, which has been increasing steadily in recent decades. The great bulk of that is directly attributable to outdoor and nature tourism, to folks coming to hike and camp, watch whales, fish, sea-kayak among icebergs, or go birding. Cape St. Mary’s, which, as Peterson noted, once went years without a visitor, now gets more than eighteen thousand tourists each summer, drawn by one of the world’s most accessible large seabird colonies.

There is no need to traverse bogs with a pack animal these days, or to struggle with the sea, as the builders of the original lighthouse did; it took them three months to get the first lamp out here in 1860, failing over and over again to safely land the massive glass orb. Today, not far from the lighthouse, there is a large new visitors center, a red-roofed white building named in honor of Les Tuck, with big windows that look east half a mile to the fingered headlands where most of the birds nest and above which white gannets perpetually swirl. Such is the view, that is to say, when you can see it; fog may blanket the cape three days out of four in the summer.

We were lucky; it was a bright if windy day, and I was anxious to see the birds up close. Inside, we were greeted by Tony Power, the reserve’s manager, who was expecting us and who introduced us to Chris Mooney, one of his interpreters—both of them quietly friendly in the way I’ve come to expect from Newfoundlanders. Chris was a big, bluff man in his thirties, with premature gray in his dark hair and goatee, who grew up in the nearby village of Branch; like many on the so-called Irish coast of Newfoundland, he had a pronounced brogue. Tony and me, we’re both talking slow so you can understand, he said with a smile, after we’d been chatting a while. It hurts me jaw to speak so slow.

The trail leading out to the colony, a shaley path through sheep-cropped grass, wandered close to the edge of the cliff and was marked along the way with small rock cairns every few yards; this is not a place where you’d want to lose your way in the fog, and even the sure-footed sheep sometimes make a mistake and fall to their deaths. Chris led us off the trail and out onto the cape, the wind snatching words from our mouths and the hat from my head, which I saved with a frantic lunge. The ground was hummocked and broken, purplish red rock split into sharp-edged blocks over which grew an almost solid cover of blazing orange lichen known as Xanthoria, which thrives on the nutrient-laden air near seabird colonies. We hopped a little trickle of a stream, where the fuzzy buckskin-colored fiddleheads of cinnamon fern were just uncurling, then sat down near the edge of the cliff, out of the wind a bit, as Chris set up a spotting scope.

During most of the year, seabirds roam the oceans hundreds, even thousands of miles from land and are all but invincible on the wing. But they’re vulnerable when they come to land to nest, so they tend to pick the most inaccessible places to breed—lonely islands, remote cliffs, unclimbable rock stacks. At Cape St. Mary’s, the murres, razorbills, and kittiwakes nest all along the mainland cliffs, forming a layer-cake effect typical of seabird colonies: The white icing of the kittiwakes was highest, each one sitting on a neat, mounded little nest of grass and wrack, most with their heads turned and bills tucked into their back feathers, dozing. Below them were the dark murres, standing in little mobs wherever the ledges were wide enough to support them, facing the wall as they balanced their single eggs beneath their bellies on the bare rock—the view through the four-week-long incubation period must leave a great deal to be desired.

Most of the ten thousand pairs at Cape St. Mary’s are common murres, but a few—maybe one pair in a thousand—are thick-billed murres, a slightly stockier, beefier species that is among the most abundant seabirds in the Arctic, but rarer at these more southerly latitudes. With Chris’s scope, we could see the diagnostic white streak along the upper mandible of the thick-billeds, but he, with long familiarity, pointed out an identification shortcut that you won’t find in any field guide: their guano. The ledges below a common murre nest were stained with white droppings, while those of the thick-billeds were pinkish, perhaps from a dietary difference.

While gulls and murres can make do with narrow cliff ledges, the gannets need more room. At Cape St. Mary’s, their activity focuses on Bird Rock, a four-hundred-foot-tall square-sided block with a wide, flat top, separated from the mainland by a gap of fifty feet and protected by sheer sides that killed several of the early climbers who tried to scale it. It is here that most of the gannets stake out their tiny nesting territories, defending just as much ground as they can reach with their long, sharp bills; from a distance, the white birds appear to be precisely spaced like geometrically arranged snowballs.

And a lot of snowballs—eleven thousand pairs of gannets crowd the rock, up from fewer than forty-five hundred pairs in the 1950s, a time when fishermen still killed them, thinking them to be competitors. (In a neat bit of turnabout, today the gannets have incorporated so many bits of fishing tackle and nylon rope into their messy grass-and-seaweed nests that the colony has a pervasive plastic green tinge.) Wheeling above those incubating their eggs, always moving in a clockwise flow, flew hundreds more, a constant coming and going from the fishing grounds, birds jockeying the air currents to execute very precise landings on their spot, and their spot alone—for even inadvertent trespassers were treated to bites and beak stabs.

Any birder has his or her own favorites, and gannets have always been among mine. I see them most often in winter, when they hunt the sea south as far as the Gulf of Mexico, usually far from the sight of land unless the wind pushes them toward shore; I remember many frigid days, staring into an easterly wind through teary eyes, watching legions of white gannets spear down into the water for fish. The dry ornithological term plunge-diving doesn’t do this justice; the gannet’s hunting technique has a lean ferocity that is utterly

Reviews for Return to Wild America

[satyridae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Weidensaul retraces the original Wild America tour taken by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. Ultimately hopeful, with some white-knuckle parts about global warming and the changes that have come with human-introduced species. I've never read the original, so I don't know how this one compares. Weidensaul's a good writer and an amusing one, but one never loses sight of the fact that his overwhelming passion is birds.

[billsearth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Weidensal's other books are outstanding. They combine thorough research with the excitement of the search in the field. This book has the research but lacks the excitement of the field effort. For some reason the descriptions of being out in the field observing just do not have near the excitement as captured in the other Weidensaul books. In essence it is Peterson's field trip without Peterson's excitement and with mostly fewer birds. It is a description of how the continent has changed since 1953.

[sandydog1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a fast and easy read. A bit of a downer with regards to modern conservation efforts within our country.

[kirkmona · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Revisiting the landmark 1955 book, Wild America, written by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher would seem to be at once an exhilarating journey across both the continent and time but it is also a daunting task. Author Scott Weidensaul proves it to be both but also shows that he is up to the challenge. I’d personally love to take the challenge of following in their footsteps and take on the task of revisiting the sites they saw but I’d not do it lightly. Fisher and Peterson took on an epic 30,000 mile journey and wrote about it in details that have made generations of naturalists drool and turn into fiendish page turners into the wee hours of the night, eventually dreaming of far away places. Weidensaul has accomplished the same task. I spent many evenings tucked into a warm bed with dry arctic air cascading down from the north as I read with rapt attention about the changes that have occurred to the wild lands of our country. Weidensaul doesn’t attempt to follow the exact course of the original book. Some of the locations no longer exist and time has shown that while they visited some spectacular locations, had they traveled a few miles away from their mapped locations, even greater treasures awaited. By following Peterson and Fishers general course but straying a bit from the path, Weidensaul is able to visit a few places unknown to Peterson and Fisher and he is able take a barometer reading on the true state of today’s Wild America.The book is written beautifully with the same attention to detail that draws fellow naturalists into a rich landscape. When Weidensaul sits atop a rock outcropping on the Olympic peninsula listening to marmots whistle as they watch the same adult golden eagle he watches, his descriptive writing style makes us feel like we are right beside him taking part in both his experience and a discussion about the landscape.Some nature writers record only the journey, some discuss only the land, some merely tally flora and fauna and some discuss only the philosophical meaning of what they see. Too often natural history travelogue books focus on just one of these and they become tiring lists of species or read like a dry itinerary. Weidensaul has avoided all of these traps and seamlessly weaves together the history of the land, observations from the original Wild America book, descriptions of species and their habits as well as the stunning landscapes he explores along the journey. He also spices up his writing with a dry wit that brings together a tight package of writing that is sure to please.While I enjoyed the book immensely, I do still find myself wondering about those places that Weidensaul didn’t visit on his re-created tour. That’s part of the magic of reading about all there is for a naturalist to see on our enormous continent. Like the naturalists before me, I’ll have to hop in the car, hope the gasoline holds out a few more miles and explore our wild America.